Advertisement

Your daily reminder the New York Knicks are a dysfunctional franchise

Ben Rohrbach
·Senior NBA writer
These guys couldn't be more excited to be playing for the Knicks right now. (Getty Images)
These guys couldn’t be more excited to be playing for the Knicks right now. (Getty Images)

Carmelo Anthony would like a meeting with team president Phil Jackson, Derrick Rose would like to play more (some?) defense, and Courtney Lee would like to stop losing by one possession, so at least the New York Knicks are planning to show up for work, which is more than they could say last week.

A week after Rose skipped work against the New Orleans Pelicans without so much as an explanation until returning from Chicago the next day and five days after we thought the Knicks had reached what they should have hoped was rock bottom, that bottom fell out again and again — first in another rift between Anthony and Jackson, then by Rose harping on defense and finally with Lee on Instagram.

[Follow Ball Don’t Lie on social media: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr]

Following a critical column by Jackson confidante Charley Rosen — who pondered, “The only sure thing is that Carmelo Anthony has outlived his usefulness in New York,” and, “It’s understood that he’d only accept being dealt to the [Cleveland] Cavaliers or the [Los Angeles] Clippers” — Melo indicated he’d like to chat with the legendary coach turned subpar executive and supposed source of Rosen’s report.

And that meeting happened on Tuesday:

Nothing of consequence may result from the meeting. They also reportedly met briefly in December, when Jackson told the CBS Sports Network, “Carmelo a lot of times wants to hold the ball longer than — we have a rule: If you hold a pass two seconds, you benefit the defense. So he has a little bit of a tendency to hold it for three, four, five seconds, and then everybody comes to a stop.”

And considering the section of Rosen’s column concentrating on Anthony began with this statement …

Carmelo Anthony’s legs are going, going, almost gone. As ever, he’s still a dangerous scorer but resists any offensive game plan that limits his one-on-one adventures. Moreover, his sticky fingers causes whatever ball-and-player movement is in effect to come to a grinding stop.

Since Melo has been mostly shooting blanks in the clutch — he was scoreless in the fourth quarter last night — it’s really a dead stop.

… it sure doesn’t seem as though much was accomplished from their December face-to-face, so long as we’re still working under Anthony’s assumption that Rosen’s words channel Jackson’s thoughts. And if Anthony still wants to retire with the Knicks and Jackson indeed prefers to move on from Melo, then the Zen Master has nobody to blame but himself, since he signed off on the no-trade clause.

So, that meeting sounded fun.

Meanwhile, Rose, who’s individual defensive rating of 109.5 ranks 349th in the league this season — a hair better than former Chicago Bulls teammate and current Knicks starting center Joakim Noah (109.6) — would like coach Jeff Hornacek to rule the team’s defense with more of an iron fist going forward.

“We were just talking about defensive schemes, what I see with our defense, what he thinks our problems are. I just told him, it’s defense,” Rose told reporters, via the New York Daily News, of his discussion with Hornacek after Saturday’s practice. “Our defense triggers a lot of things. And I told him he has to be on us hard about defense every day. Like, beat it in our heads where we get tired of hearing him talking about it.”

[…]

“It’s not just one element. It’s all of it — effort, schemes, decision-making, personnel, communication. It’s everything,” Rose added. “You can tell when we’re out there. You have some games where we have everything clicking. It’s no middle ground with us. It’s either we look good, or we look quite different than that. I wanted to say another word, but quite different than that. We got to have an in-between. Then right when we’re slipping, we got to be able to let everybody be aware of that and try to fix it — not after the game, but during the game.”

Rose knows a thing or two about this, since he and Noah played five seasons under Tom Thibodeau on Bulls teams that often ranked among the league’s top defensive units. Whether it’s a lack of familiarity with his new teammates, a lack of effort on his own part or playing alongside a franchise player who, as Rosen wrote, “is intent on saving even more steps on this end of the game to conserve his energy for offense,” Rose has been no shining example of Thibodeau’s defensive philosophy. The Knicks are 3.7 points per 100 possessions worse defensively with Rose on the floor this season, meaning their defense improves from a bottom-three unit to a middle-of-the road outfit once he goes to the bench.

[Sign up for Yahoo Fantasy Basketball | Mock Draft | The Vertical | Latest news]

So, no matter how much Hornacek harps on defense, it’s still on Rose & Co. to show up and work. Coaches can help with schemes, decision-making and communication, but effort is on the players. As for personnel, would Rose be comfortable knowing better defense might mean fewer minutes for him?

Without verbalizing it, that’s the question Hornacek posed to Lee, a guard once lauded for his pitbullish defense whose on/off numbers now only rate slightly better than Rose’s on that end. After starting all 37 games he had appeared in until Monday, Lee was relegated to the bench in favor of undrafted rookie Ron Baker in a move Hornacek reasoned was because, “Ron just competes.”

The Knicks promptly lost to the Atlanta Hawks, 108-107, during which Lee remained sidelined for the game’s final 16:30, including the last five seconds, when Rose, Anthony and Noah all missed potential game-winning shots inside of a few feet. Afterwards, Lee took to Instagram, posting a pair of since-deleted pictures from the “Dumb and Dumber” film series — a seemingly not-so-subtle shot at the organization made worse by his use of a photo from the truly awful prequel “Dumb and Dumberer”:

Lee attempted to clarify the meaning behind his deleted photos with yet another Instagram post:

I posted a pic of dumb n dumber cuz that was my mood, no jab at no1. It's dumb that we have a talented team and we're in position to win games n keep losing by 1 possession. We'll figure it out collectively as a team but that was my mood after the game. Has nothing to with any change, rotation, system, players, coaches, so let that be clear. In other news Happy MLK day.

A photo posted by Courtney Lee (@courtneylee) on Jan 16, 2017 at 4:45pm PST

“I posted a pic of dumb n dumber cuz that was my mood, no jab at no1,” Lee wrote in his (sic)-heavy caption. “It’s dumb that we have a talented team and we’re in position to win games n keep losing by 1 possession. We’ll figure it out collectively as a team but that was my mood after the game. Has nothing to with any change, rotation, system, players, coaches, so let that be clear. In other news Happy MLK day.”

So, the Knicks aren’t dumb. It’s just dumb that they’ve lost one-point games to the Milwaukee Bucks, Philadelphia 76ers and Hawks in the past two weeks alone, dropping three games out of the Eastern Conference playoff race in the process. And even if Lee won’t say as much, it’s also dumb that the team president is bickering with one star through the media while his coaching staff apparently needed a reminder from another star that defense is something to be continually stressed in practice.

It remains to be seen whether a meeting between Anthony and Jackson, more defensive work or a social media rant will do anything to improve the work environment in New York, since the Knicks are still mired in a string of 11 losses in 13 games since Christmas. And we’ll just have to wait until Wednesday’s game against the Brooklyn Nets to know if the Knicks have really hit rock bottom yet.

– – – – – – –

Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!